How To Deal with Disruption
I am so thrilled to be able to introduce you to my good friend Sarah Larsen. Sarah is a business coach and serial entrepreneur who knows what it feels like to be overwhelmed by decision fatigue and unsure whose advice to follow. There's no magic blueprint that fits every business. Sarah's coaching starts with listening and learning about you and your vision. Together you'll find strategies that work for you, so you can be confident and excited about your business everyday.
I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed on her Podcast: The Hook, With Sarah Larsen.
On the podcast, we discuss the stories we tell ourselves and how they relate to disruptions in our lives. Make sure you take a listen after you read her post below.
I am a work in progress.
If you’ve listened to my podcast episode with Jenni, you’ll know that disruption is a lens through which I see life these days. I believe disruption can be good (getting married, getting a promotion) or bad (getting a cancer diagnosis, losing a job), and we can disrupt someone else’s life by decisions we make, particularly our partner or spouse, or our children.
Five years ago, my husband and I had to leave a business which he had owned with a partner and childhood friend, and one that I had helped run almost since its inception. It was not a civil parting of ways for the partners, and although we received some compensation, it did not make us whole. My husband continues to be plagued by the aftermath.
Standing in the rubble of our lives the day after leaving, we looked around and saw that the identities we’d created for ourselves, CEO and COO of a previously thriving business, had fallen into shadow. How had we let this person bring us so low?
The answer is that he is a pathological liar and narcissist. But we couldn’t help the creep of depression and felt sure we had screwed things up massively along the way. Which is what the narcissist wanted us to think, and told everyone he could that’s what had happened.
My approach to disruption is typically one of optimism. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to get a job working for another company. I told myself it was because I didn’t want to put in the long hours and obsessive work ethic of a C-level role for someone else’s vision. That was part of it, but also, I didn’t want to find out that I was an imposter. I had been the Chief Operations Officer of a small manufacturing firm owned by my husband. What if everyone just thought it was nepotism, and it was really my fault the business was failing?
Instead, I started and quit several new businesses, and decided to write a novel. In the midst of all this trial and error, I discovered intuitive eating. I have been a chronic dieter since my mid-twenties when I saw the first signs of weight gain in my life. Intuitive eating promised to help me lose the diet mentality of good and bad foods, and was supposed to teach me how to listen to my body, and allow it to find its own “set weight.” It still sounds like the food freedom I was looking for, but in reality, it takes far longer than a couple of months to fight back against years of diet culture indoctrination.
For me, intuitive eating turned into emotional eating. The permission to eat all foods, was permission to eat ALL THE FOOD. I still wasn’t paying attention to my hunger signals and was assured that the weight gain was the typical increase in weight before I eventually settled at a weight that was right for my body. I continued to gain weight over the next couple of years. That gave me another new identity. I learned to embrace the bigger me, but I still yearned for a previous version of myself.
I’ve had psoriasis since I was two or three years old, although it wasn’t diagnosed until I reached my twenties. In a low-carb diet phase, I noticed my psoriasis had nearly disappeared, but it returned when I started eating carbs again. The Psoriasis had gotten worse as I had gained weight, so when I learned that there was a doctor recommending a carnivore diet because it had cured eczema (also an inflammatory disease) that was so bad he’d been hospitalized, I thought, “I should try that!”
The idea was that I’d eliminate everything except beef from my diet for a period of time and then slowly add food back in to see what was causing the psoriatic flare ups. I told myself that the beneficial side effect of weight loss wasn’t the reason I was doing it, but I lost a lot of weight very quickly, and instead of slowly adding foods that had been eliminated back into my life, I returned to my previous eating habits.
Over the course of the next year, the weight also returned. To make matters worse, eating carnivore had done nothing to improve my psoriasis, and about the time I gave up an all meat diet, my hair started thinning, which is a common complaint of carnivore and keto followers.
In 2022, I started a new business, and a few weeks ago I launched a podcast. I am excited to finally be doing something that feels right for me. As I said, disruption can be good or bad, and this one is great! But it means that I have a lot of distractions, and although I’m working with a nutrition coach to help me create a realistic relationship with food, I have a long way to go. I’m still adjusting to my newest identity.
Now, instead of going all in on an extreme diet, I’m taking baby steps, but I want my health to be a priority because I can’t focus on what my business needs if I’m not fueling myself properly. There are three things I’m working on right now: eating more protein (not all protein!) and fewer processed foods, walking more with a target of 8,000-10,000 steps per day, and getting a minimum of 7-8 hours of sleep per night. This time I know I will learn to combat emotional eating and really define what intuitive eating looks like for me because I am approaching it slowly, stacking my habits, and allowing myself to embrace the season I am in now. I’m starting! I’m not waiting for the perfect time to insert a crash course diet, but rather looking at what life realistically looks like for me and building healthy habits that will help me discover my own version of food freedom in the end.
I’m also doing some mindset work using a variety of methods because I still struggle with emotional eating. I am not perfect at any of this, but we are all a work in progress. I’m just focusing on improving myself a little each day, and that’s how we get through disruption.
~Sarah
Make sure you check out Sarah’s Podcast: The Hook. Subscribe and Share
